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Ryerson Image Centre focuses on photography

In a world where images are taking over from words, it’s no wonder the camera is king. And now that most of us carry a camera most of the time, virtually everyone possesses the power to change that world.

In this digital age, as never before, the photograph reveals all.

Tom Arban's superb shot of the new Ryerson Image Centre lit up at night shows the ever-changing colours of the building's facade. (Tom Arban photo)

But to grasp the full extent of what that means, and the essential role photography plays in our lives, you must visit the new Ryerson Image Centre.

On September 29, when the RIC opens its new home at 33 Gould St., just east of Yonge, it will instantly become a global centre of photographic culture and scholarship. Encompassing the popular and the esoteric, journalistic and artistic, study and display, the centre brings vast resources to a field that never fails to yield rich fruit.

The RIC will also add new lustre to a city that long ago embraced photography. Think of Contact, Toronto’s month-long celebration of all things photographic, the galleries and the practitioners who have careers here, from John Reeves and Barbara Astman to Ed Burtynsky.

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Ensconced in striking new quarters that also include the Ryerson School of Image Arts, RIC comprises a couple of galleries, screening room, offices as well as work and storage space. Fittingly, the building itself presents an essay of sorts on light, which lies, of course, at the heart of photography, digital or analog.

Designed by Toronto’s Diamond Schmitt Architects, the three-storey structure is clad in glass, transparent and translucent, that changes colours while it glows at night. As Greek philosopher Heraclitus might have said of the ever-altering structure, the building we see is not the one at which we look — or something like that.

Which brings us back to photography, the medium that freezes the moment but leaves it forever beyond our grasp.

On the other hand, because of RIC, students and visiting scholars will have total access to the massive Black Star Collection and all the time they need to look. The 292,000 pictures amassed by the photographic agency over five decades were given to Ryerson by an anonymous donor who bought them some years ago with the idea of handing them over to an appropriate institution.

The fact the unnamed philanthropist chose Ryerson is an indication of how far RIC has come. Though it dates back to the 1960s, it had little profile before construction of the new building began in 2008.

Now RIC has the potential to reach out and attract a larger audience than was ever possible. After all, more than the sum of its parts, buildings and institutions such as this create awareness, accessibility and, best of all, excitement.

The inaugural exhibition, Archival Dialogues, explores Black Star and its many iconic pictures through the eyes of eight well-known Toronto artists — Michael Snow, David Rokeby, Vid Ingelevics, Stephen Andrews, Christina Battle, Marie-Helene Cousineau, Stan Douglas and Vera Frenkel. Each has chosen images from the collection and responded to them in his or her own way.

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“It’s been a long journey,” admits RIC director Doina Popescu. “We are a collecting institution but we have no interest in mothballing history. We’re focused on objects, but students can come in and learn from the artifacts in the collection, which is also a teaching collection.”

As Popescu points out, the contents of Black Star are documentary; it includes everything from portraiture to hard news and feature photography. She plans an ongoing series of shows of photographs from the Black Star chosen by guest curators.

In another gallery, student work will be displayed. The opening exhibition, The Art of the Archive, also examines RIC’s extensive holdings.

Popescu insists that students, though raised in a digital universe, will be introduced — exposed? — to the photography of the 20th century. Back then, film was still used and the photographic print was an object worthy of study in its own right. Indeed, Black Star’s pictures, covered in editing marks and white-out, have a visceral presence. Each one tells its own story as well as that of its subject. They come from the pre-electronic age, a time when pictures were manipulated manually and the image had physical existence.

The pictures themselves are stored in hundreds of cardboard boxes stacked in a special room where temperature (16C degrees) and humidity (40 percent) are rigidly controlled. Just beside is the entire photographic archive of Life magazine, which during its heyday sold more than 13 million copies weekly.

Popescu and her crew took possession of the building only four months ago and have been busy ever since trying to bring order out of chaos. In her four years at Ryerson, she has had to create a fully functioning institution where before only a collection existed.

With its flowing, light-filled spaces, the new galleries will make RIC a star in the Toronto — and international — photographic firmament. It is a place whose time has come.

“It’s been a long hard process,” Popescu admits. “We had to start from scratch and do everything. But we’ve only been here since May and we’re just getting to know the spaces.”

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